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Study physics if you want a ticket to ride

CALL it the Higgs boson effect, the Big Bang Theory effect or even the Brian Cox effect, if you must. There’s no getting away from it – after years in the doldrums, physics is cool.

Just a few years ago it was almost an extinct subject at A-level, but this year university applications to read physics saw a 7 per cent leap despite the fee increase. And if you’ve come out the other side, you can be forgiven for being more than a little smug&colon; not only can you impress at parties by explaining the latest news on the Higgs, but you can take your pick of an enviable range of career options, and are likely to command a higher starting salary than graduates in the other sciences.

“Physicists are always in demand, across all sectors,” says Stephanie Richardson, head of membership development at the Institute of Physics (IOP) in London. “Their problem-solving skills, their mathematical skills, their ability to think critically – these transferable skills are useful in a huge range of areas, irrespective of the topic.”

To the ends of the Earth

From mountaintops to desert plains, abandoned mines to the depths of the ocean, physics research is a ticket to some unique destinations. Luca Rizzi works at one of the most advanced telescopes in the world – and even the daily commute is a source of satisfaction. “When I drive home, it’s about sunset time, and for 25 minutes all I see is ocean and sunset. It’s so rewarding, every day.” Rizzi is a support astronomer, assisting academics visiting the Keck Observatory on top of the Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii.

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When I drive home, it’s about sunset time and for 25 minutes all I see is ocean and sunset. It’s so rewarding, every single day

Far from Hawaii, Carlos Pobes of the University of Wisconsin-Madison doesn’t see the sunset for months on end – he works on the IceCube neutrino detector in Antarctica. The detector, the biggest of its kind in the world, uses sensors buried more than a mile beneath the ice of the South Pole to record data on high-energy neutrinos as they pass silently through the Earth.

The driest place on Earth, the Atacama desert in Chile, also draws physicists – it’s a superb site for making observations of the sky in the radio spectrum. Postdoc Jeff Wagg is based at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), where he studies galaxies from the first hundred million years after the big bang. Wagg, who is employed by ALMA’s operator, the European Southern Observatory, says that for him, travelling the world was a big part of the attraction of a career in astrophysics. He has made the most of his assignments, taking the opportunity to surf in Chile and dive in the Pacific during his time off. “You definitely take it into account when you’re putting in proposals. I have a collaborator who’s always coming up with ideas to allow us to return to Hawaii.”

A background in astrophysics is the natural precursor to observatory work, and you can gain experience by travelling to observatories alongside professors as part of a relevant PhD project, or by building instrumentation in the lab, says Bob Goodrich, head of the observing support group at the Keck Observatory. IceCube’s research group recruits physicists directly for their “winter-over” positions&colon; you need no prior sub-zero experience, but have to be prepared to stick it out for the whole of the Antarctic’s seemingly endless winter.

Into space

We might be a little behind the US and Russia, but if the politicians are to be believed, the UK’s heyday in space is at hand – and physicists are poised to reap the rewards.

In 2010, the UK Space Agency was established, bringing together all the country’s space interests under one body. But the space sector was in rude health even before that, says Keith Mason, a director of the even more recently launched International Space Innovation Centre (ISIC) in Harwell, Oxfordshire. The boom has largely come off the back of new applications spun out from space technology, such as satnav, and the promise of a bigger market as the global space industry increasingly becomes privatised. ISIC has been set up to take advantage of these.

Financial rewards aside, the country’s involvement in high-profile projects such as the James Webb Space Telescope has given the UK’s space endeavours extra lustre in recent years. “There’s a real buzz about the space industry,” concurs Geoff Buswell, a project director at ISIC. “Some of my senior colleagues say they’ve never seen it like this before.”

But the industry is “desperately short of people with the right skill set”, says Mason, and this is the case across government, industry and academia. Buswell, who has been seconded to ISIC from the IT company Logica, went into industry after his PhD because he “wanted the buzz and urgency of a commercial environment”. Aerospace firms such as Astrium run apprenticeships and graduate entry schemes, as does Logica, which develops software for space applications such as satellites. The UK Space Agency and the European Space Agency also provide opportunities; ESA runs a trainee scheme for master’s level students and offers postdoc opportunities. Finally, if your dream is to become an astronaut, that’s possible at ESA as well, although much more difficult – the last time it accepted recruits to the European Astronaut Corps was in 2009.

To the City

By far the biggest employer of new physics graduates is the financial sector, which took in nearly a fifth of 2011 graduates. Employers love physicists’ numeracy and analytical skills, while successful applicants enjoy higher starting salaries than most other professions can offer, and a fast-paced environment.

“A major misconception is that you have to be an economist to work here,” says Cat Hines, a graduate recruiter at the Bank of England. “We’re not expecting graduates to demonstrate any technical knowledge about economics or finance during the recruitment process; it’s purely about how they take the information that’s given to them, pull out what’s important and present it back to us.” Graduate schemes at banking and investment firms are highly competitive, and it can boost your chances of selection if you can secure an internship during the summer of your penultimate year at university.

“When I arrived I had to learn a new language – the language of economics and finance,” says Jack Garrett-Jones, a regulatory policy analyst at the Bank of England, which he joined right after he graduated. “But once I got that in my head, it was actually the same underlying structures and thought processes I used in my degree”.